Books by Nicolette Makovicky
Slogans: Subjection, Subversion and the Politics of Neoliberalism, 2018
Focusing on contexts of accelerated economic and political reform, this volume critically examine... more Focusing on contexts of accelerated economic and political reform, this volume critically examines the role of slogans in the contemporary projects of populist mobilization, neoliberal governance, and civic subversion. Bringing together a collection of ethnographic studies from Slovakia, Poland, Abu Dhabi, Peru, and China, the contributors analyze the way in which slogans both convey and contest the values and norms that lie at the core of hegemonic political economic projects and ideologies.
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Since the onset of the global economic crisis, activists, policy makers, and social scientists ha... more Since the onset of the global economic crisis, activists, policy makers, and social scientists have been searching for alternative paradigms through which to re-imagine contemporary modes of thinking and writing about economic orders. These attempts have led to their re-engagement with fundamental anthropological categories of economic analysis, such as barter, debt, and the gift. Focusing on favours, and the paradoxes of action, meaning, and significance they engender, this volume advocates for their addition to this list of economic universals. It presents a critical re-interrogation of the conceptual relationships between gratuitous and instrumental behaviour, and raises novel questions about the intersection of economic actions with the ethical and expressive aspects of human life.
Scholars of post-socialist politics and society have often used 'favour' as a by-word for corruption and clientelism. The contributors to this volume treat favours, and the doing of favours, as a distinct mode of acting, rather than as a form of 'masked' economic exchange or simply an expression of goodwill. Casting their comparative net from post-socialist Central, Eastern, and South Eastern Europe; to the former Soviet Union, Mongolia, and post-Maoist China, the contributors to this volume show how gratuitous behaviour shapes a plethora of different actions, practices, and judgements across religious and political life, imaginative practices, and local moral economies. They show that favours do not operate 'outside' or 'beyond' the economic sphere. Rather, they constitute a distinct mode of action which has economic consequences, without being fully explicable in terms of transactional cost-benefit analyses.
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Neoliberalism, Personhood, and Postsocialism explores the formation of subjectivities in newly ma... more Neoliberalism, Personhood, and Postsocialism explores the formation of subjectivities in newly marketized or marketizing societies across the former Eastern Bloc, documenting the rise of the neo-liberal discourse of the ‘enterprising’ self in government policy, corporate management and education, as well as examining the shifts in forms of capital amongst marginal capitalists and entrepreneurs working in the grey zone between the formal and informal economies.
A rich investigation of the tools of neo-liberal governance and the responses of entrepreneurs and families in changing societies, this book reveals the full complexity of the relationship between historically and socially embedded economic practices, and the increasing influence of libertarian political and economic thought on public policy, institutional reform, and civil society initiatives. As such, it will appeal to anthropologists, sociologists and geographers with interests in political discourse, identity, entrepreneurship and organizations in post-socialist societies
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Articles & Book Chapters by Nicolette Makovicky
East European Politics and Societies, 2023
This special section aims to shed light on moral milieus and agencies in contemporary capitalist ... more This special section aims to shed light on moral milieus and agencies in contemporary capitalist Central and Eastern Europe. Drawing on case studies from Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Romania, and Russia, it offers insight into changing perceptions of proper economy and practice amongst a broad range of actors—from landfill workers to business managers and the super-rich. The contributors explore how actors at various scales morally construct, contest, and defend ideas of justice, (re-)distribution, and social worth, as well as socio-economic hierarchy, inequality, and harm. They analyse the capitalist moral transformation and order in the region and examine the local appropriation of and buy-in to (as well as critique of) aspects of neoliberal moral orders—a topic sidelined in much of the existing moral economy scholarship. Exploring a broad range of moral economic phenomena, the contributors move beyond the conventional definition of morals as prosocial norms and action, approaching morals as a broader empirical phenomenon of economy and politics. They examine the actions, practices, and reasoning of different actors in relation to shifting notions of acceptable and unacceptable, just and unjust, and praiseworthy and blameworthy behaviour. As such, this collection makes the case for widening the empirical object and analytical purchase of moral economy to include the study of not only moral critiques and resistance to capitalism but also the diverse moral agencies, milieus and orders of capitalism, and the ways in which the advancement and embedding of the capitalist moral order has shaped economic life in the region.
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Social Analysis, 2020
This special issue decenters tax as an analytic device for understanding the relationship between... more This special issue decenters tax as an analytic device for understanding the relationship between state and citizen while examining the limits of social contract thinking. Focusing on how citizens interpret and react to state efforts to promote fiscal citizenship, it sheds light on contemporary fiscal structures and public debates about the moralities, practices, and imaginaries of tax systems. The contributors use tax to explore the nature of citizenship, personal freedom, and moral and economic value. They also highlight how taxation may be influenced by spaces of fiscal sovereignty that exist outside or alongside the state in the form of alternative religious and economic communities.
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Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale, 2020
Masks are boundary objects, mediating between ideas of contamination and containment, purity and ... more Masks are boundary objects, mediating between ideas of contamination and containment, purity and pollutions, and life and death. Since the outbreak of COVID‐19, however, they perform a new kind of boundary work: they demarcate and negotiate the relationship not only between the body and the body politic, the individual citizen and the national whole.
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Journal of Material Culture, 2020
Drawing on fieldwork amongst lacemakers in Slovakia, this article examines the relationship betwe... more Drawing on fieldwork amongst lacemakers in Slovakia, this article examines the relationship between practices of making and the production of value in artisanal labour. The author shows that the processes of making challenged artisans’ perceptions of the natural distribution of agency between humans and objects, resulting in feelings of ontological insecurity. Arguing that they perceived this insecurity as a problem of ethics, as well as a problem of agency, she demonstrates how the intellectual and sensual experience of manufacture was constitutive of the ways in which artisans perceived the value of their craftwork. Taking this approach, the article seeks to disrupt the anthropological habit of framing questions about value in terms of domestic economies, global markets and aesthetic regimes, and making in terms of skilled practice, embodied knowledge and knowledge transmission. The author also suggests that scholars ought to pay more attention to the ways in which ethical considerations are grounded in our ontological disposition towards the material world.
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Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2018
This article asks what role local models of agency and subjectivity play in the structure and
int... more This article asks what role local models of agency and subjectivity play in the structure and
interpretation of informal economic practices, and how this influences the ways in which people
narrate their behaviour to others. Exploring the use of a common Polish idiom for informal activities –
kombinowanie – amongst villagers in the Carpathian Highlands, it argues that the term acts as a
‘master-trope’ for local identity, providing villagers with a narrative model for asserting and
broadcasting their social agency to peers. Furthermore, it shows how in this particular ethnographic
context, the retelling of instances of informal or illegal activity as kombinowanie can be seen as part of a
Highlander ‘poetics of self’, in that each manifestation of the term carries with it a series of implicit
sociohistorical and normative meanings that relate to notions of ‘typical’ Gorale (Highland) behaviour. ´
By characterizing kombinowanie as a type of tactics, I open up the term for comparative analysis with
other local conceptions of agency which value insubordination.
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Pastoralism: Research, Policy and Practice, 2018
Since the mid-2000s, transhumant pastoralism and the production of artisanal sheep's cheeses have... more Since the mid-2000s, transhumant pastoralism and the production of artisanal sheep's cheeses have experienced a revival in the Polish Carpathians. This revival has largely coincided with Poland's accession to the European Union in 2004, leading to a re-valuation of extensive livestock production from an economic and environmental liability to a form of 'High Nature Value' farming. Supported by Common Agricultural Policy CAP European Union subsidies, Polish pastoralists have been reclassified from being producers of livestock and agricultural products to suppliers of environmental and ecosystem services. Despite these changes, however, they continue to face significant systemic challenges which are rooted in the marked decline of the communist-era pastoral economy in the late 1980s and a subsequent increasing competition for land and labour under market conditions. Based on anthropological fieldwork conducted in Poland's Carpathian Highland region during the 2015, 2016, and 2017 pastoral seasons, this article provides insight into four sets of challenges deemed most important by working shepherds today: recruiting qualified labour, gaining access to pasture, gaining access to markets, and working within a Polish policy environment which fails to recognise the particular conditions and requirements of pastoral agriculture.
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Etnologia Actualis, 2017
This article considers the role of information, communication, and knowledge in processes of exch... more This article considers the role of information, communication, and knowledge in processes of exchange and value creation in the British antiques market. As such, it positions itself between the long-standing anthropological interest in the cultural construction of value (see APPADURAI 1986; GRAEBER 2001), and the equally long-standing interest in how asymmetries of information affect consumer behaviour (see AKERLOF 1970). Drawing on ethnographic material gathered over three months of fieldwork amongst antique dealers in the Notting Hill and Kensington Area of London, I aim to through light on what it is that dealers 'know' and how this knowledge is translated into profit within the trade. I argue that dealers' knowledge of objects is encyclopaedic, discursive, and tactile at once and it is gained mainly through many years of handling of objects. Dealers must also keep abreast with the market movement of objects and their prices using this information to gage the potential profit they may accrue from a deal. Both forms of knowledge, I argue, are mobilized at once when a dealer is investing in stock and when he or she seeks to sell an item, in a ritual of show-and-tell that serves to both to verify the quality, condition and authenticity of a piece and to simultaneously negotiate its price.
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Slogans. Subjection, Subversion, and the Politics of Neoliberalism, 2018
In this volume, we examine the production and use of political slogans in various locales across ... more In this volume, we examine the production and use of political slogans in various locales across the globe, seeking to throw light on how words are employed to persuade and affect publics in an age of global capitalism. We consider how the slogan as a particular cultural form operates in settings where political performance is shaped by the neoliberal logic of governance. In the ethnographic case studies collected for this volume, slogans emerge as the product of both government policy and popular action in circumstances of accelerated economic and political transitions.
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What do ‘beans for the kids’ in Kinshasa, ‘a glass of wine’ in Paris, and
‘little carps’ in Pragu... more What do ‘beans for the kids’ in Kinshasa, ‘a glass of wine’ in Paris, and
‘little carps’ in Prague have in common? ‘Variations in local cuisine’ may
spring to mind, and rightly so. However, they are also ways of referring to informal economic practices – described by many as corruption or bribery – in each of these places. And as with regional variations in cuisine, informal economic activities come in many culturally diverse guises and with many different labels that reflect local customs, histories and practices. Language, in short, is a constitutive part of all semi-legal and illegal practices, as well as the models of informality through which scholars have studied them. What, then, can expressions and euphemisms like these tell us about the way informal economic and political activities are practised and understood in different cultural and institutional contexts?
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Economies of Favour after Socialism, Dec 2016
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Neoliberalism and the Moral Economy of Fraud. Edited by David Whyte and Jorg Wiegratz.
In this chapter, I investigate narratives of fraud and moral accountability in a Polish public-pr... more In this chapter, I investigate narratives of fraud and moral accountability in a Polish public-private partnership, the Czech-Polish Euroregion of Těšínské Slezko-Śląsk Cieszyński; a self-governing network of public and private actors that works to foster transnational cooperation in the area. I show how the neoliberal reform of the Polish public sector has placed the administrators of the Euroregion in the somewhat precarious position of having to act as self-interested entrepreneurs, while also being subject to the measures of public accountability and scrutiny normally reserved for government officials. As the primary stakeholders in the Euroregion partnership, they are saddled with the task of introducing market rationality into public practice, while simultaneously being responsible for ensuring it is employed for the benefit of the greater good. I argue that examining how they negotiate this apparently paradoxical position as enforcers of neoliberal value, and guardians of the public good, allows for a unique insight into the ways moral economies of fraud are produced (and re-produced) by the structures of contemporary bureaucracy (and the people who inhabit it).
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Economies of Favour After Socialism, Dec 2016
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Neoliberalism, Personhood, and Postsocialism. Ed. Nicolette Makovicky, 2014
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FOCAAL: Journal of European Anthroplogy, 2013
Focusing on the implementation of the New Social Policy in January 2004 and the social unrest tha... more Focusing on the implementation of the New Social Policy in January 2004 and the social unrest that followed, this article traces the discursive construction of welfare dependence as a “Romani” problem through the creation of a media-led “moral panic”. Situating this “moral panic” within the wider context of competing populist narratives in postsocialist Slovakia, it argues that the ethnicization of the unrest constituted a rearticulation of nationalist populist symbols into liberal political logic. Employed by the opposition, the first of these narratives posited liberalization as the dispossession of the working majority by corrupt elites. This was countered by a second narrative presented by the center-right coalition that posited welfare as a system of “just rewards” for those willing to work, while constructing the Romani minority as social deviants. As such, it appeared to be a variant of what Stuart Hall has called “authoritarian populism”: an attempt by the leading coalition to harness popular discontents in order to justify exceptional levels of government intervention into social life.
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Wrapping and Unwrapping Material Culture: Archaeological and Anthropological Perspectives. Ed. by Susanna Harris and Laurence Douny, Jun 2014
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One of the large jali screens adorning the mausoleum of Muhammad Ghaus in Gwalior (N India), buil... more One of the large jali screens adorning the mausoleum of Muhammad Ghaus in Gwalior (N India), built in 1565, contains panels composed of disordered composite octagons and Salomon stars. These elements show a rotational disorder with some interdependence. Analysis of these partially disordered patterns with rotatable configurations of the above elements suggested that they may be approximants of a quasiperiodic octagonal tiling based on a new type of composite tiles. Comparisons with the Amman's quasiperiodic tiling were made. Instances of similar or related periodic ornamental patterns at other northern Indian localities are analyzed as well. Keywords Nonperiodic octagonal pattern Á Jali screen Á Dichroic octagonal quasiperiodic tiling Á Muhammad Ghaus Á Mausoleum Á Gwalior (N. India)
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Books by Nicolette Makovicky
Scholars of post-socialist politics and society have often used 'favour' as a by-word for corruption and clientelism. The contributors to this volume treat favours, and the doing of favours, as a distinct mode of acting, rather than as a form of 'masked' economic exchange or simply an expression of goodwill. Casting their comparative net from post-socialist Central, Eastern, and South Eastern Europe; to the former Soviet Union, Mongolia, and post-Maoist China, the contributors to this volume show how gratuitous behaviour shapes a plethora of different actions, practices, and judgements across religious and political life, imaginative practices, and local moral economies. They show that favours do not operate 'outside' or 'beyond' the economic sphere. Rather, they constitute a distinct mode of action which has economic consequences, without being fully explicable in terms of transactional cost-benefit analyses.
A rich investigation of the tools of neo-liberal governance and the responses of entrepreneurs and families in changing societies, this book reveals the full complexity of the relationship between historically and socially embedded economic practices, and the increasing influence of libertarian political and economic thought on public policy, institutional reform, and civil society initiatives. As such, it will appeal to anthropologists, sociologists and geographers with interests in political discourse, identity, entrepreneurship and organizations in post-socialist societies
Articles & Book Chapters by Nicolette Makovicky
interpretation of informal economic practices, and how this influences the ways in which people
narrate their behaviour to others. Exploring the use of a common Polish idiom for informal activities –
kombinowanie – amongst villagers in the Carpathian Highlands, it argues that the term acts as a
‘master-trope’ for local identity, providing villagers with a narrative model for asserting and
broadcasting their social agency to peers. Furthermore, it shows how in this particular ethnographic
context, the retelling of instances of informal or illegal activity as kombinowanie can be seen as part of a
Highlander ‘poetics of self’, in that each manifestation of the term carries with it a series of implicit
sociohistorical and normative meanings that relate to notions of ‘typical’ Gorale (Highland) behaviour. ´
By characterizing kombinowanie as a type of tactics, I open up the term for comparative analysis with
other local conceptions of agency which value insubordination.
‘little carps’ in Prague have in common? ‘Variations in local cuisine’ may
spring to mind, and rightly so. However, they are also ways of referring to informal economic practices – described by many as corruption or bribery – in each of these places. And as with regional variations in cuisine, informal economic activities come in many culturally diverse guises and with many different labels that reflect local customs, histories and practices. Language, in short, is a constitutive part of all semi-legal and illegal practices, as well as the models of informality through which scholars have studied them. What, then, can expressions and euphemisms like these tell us about the way informal economic and political activities are practised and understood in different cultural and institutional contexts?
Scholars of post-socialist politics and society have often used 'favour' as a by-word for corruption and clientelism. The contributors to this volume treat favours, and the doing of favours, as a distinct mode of acting, rather than as a form of 'masked' economic exchange or simply an expression of goodwill. Casting their comparative net from post-socialist Central, Eastern, and South Eastern Europe; to the former Soviet Union, Mongolia, and post-Maoist China, the contributors to this volume show how gratuitous behaviour shapes a plethora of different actions, practices, and judgements across religious and political life, imaginative practices, and local moral economies. They show that favours do not operate 'outside' or 'beyond' the economic sphere. Rather, they constitute a distinct mode of action which has economic consequences, without being fully explicable in terms of transactional cost-benefit analyses.
A rich investigation of the tools of neo-liberal governance and the responses of entrepreneurs and families in changing societies, this book reveals the full complexity of the relationship between historically and socially embedded economic practices, and the increasing influence of libertarian political and economic thought on public policy, institutional reform, and civil society initiatives. As such, it will appeal to anthropologists, sociologists and geographers with interests in political discourse, identity, entrepreneurship and organizations in post-socialist societies
interpretation of informal economic practices, and how this influences the ways in which people
narrate their behaviour to others. Exploring the use of a common Polish idiom for informal activities –
kombinowanie – amongst villagers in the Carpathian Highlands, it argues that the term acts as a
‘master-trope’ for local identity, providing villagers with a narrative model for asserting and
broadcasting their social agency to peers. Furthermore, it shows how in this particular ethnographic
context, the retelling of instances of informal or illegal activity as kombinowanie can be seen as part of a
Highlander ‘poetics of self’, in that each manifestation of the term carries with it a series of implicit
sociohistorical and normative meanings that relate to notions of ‘typical’ Gorale (Highland) behaviour. ´
By characterizing kombinowanie as a type of tactics, I open up the term for comparative analysis with
other local conceptions of agency which value insubordination.
‘little carps’ in Prague have in common? ‘Variations in local cuisine’ may
spring to mind, and rightly so. However, they are also ways of referring to informal economic practices – described by many as corruption or bribery – in each of these places. And as with regional variations in cuisine, informal economic activities come in many culturally diverse guises and with many different labels that reflect local customs, histories and practices. Language, in short, is a constitutive part of all semi-legal and illegal practices, as well as the models of informality through which scholars have studied them. What, then, can expressions and euphemisms like these tell us about the way informal economic and political activities are practised and understood in different cultural and institutional contexts?
After being offline for almost a year, this site has been freed from the dead hand of OU computing service and is now back up and running AT A NEW ADDRESS. New entries are being posted regularly.
This website is dedicated to the culture and history of lacemakers and lacemaking. It is the result of a collaboration between Nicolette Makovicky in Central and Eastern European Studies, Oxford and David Hopkin in History, Oxford. It came about through a Knowledge Exchange grant, and the site was built by Andrew Smith, a French historian at UCL. It's a work in progress, we're adding to it regularly, though we'd also like to hear from other textile specialists, historians, lace aficionados, descendants of lacemakers and practising lacemakers.